Acceleration!

[Fossaman]

So, I was wondering the other day...how many Gravities of acceleration do most ships produce? George has said that there's no artificial gravity in the commonwealth, at least, so this is kind of an important question.

Anyone feel like doing the math to find out?

[OddBob]

I was actually just about to post about a mod where I would need to figure this out. I'm quite sure it's rather large though, since it takes about one minute for the Sapphire to get from zero to 20% of the speed of light.

I'm going to see about it tomorrow if I can, this late at night I can't even spell properly . I don't think it's anything too complex. But I am probably wrong.**

EDIT:
Okay, well I can't sleep, let's dig out the physics textbooks. Apparently this really is quite simple:

Time to accelerate to max speed: 60 seconds
Final velocity: 59,958,491.6 m/s

a = Δv / Δt
(I failed this class; just so you know*)

Becomes something like 990,000 m/s^2, which is 100,000 G's, no?
Regardless of the correctness I can tell you accelerations are too big.


*Not really, this is just for dramatic effect, and so that I don't look dumb when this turns out to be wrong for some stupid reason. It is, however, possible that I may have occasionally not actually entirely showed up, per se. Learn from my mistakes: If you are still taking early math classes, make sure you learn it well. They're not lying when they tell you you'll need it in later ones.

[Burzmali]

The fun part is determining the amount of power it's engine has, given the ship's mass.

[Blinzler]

uhmmm... no artificial gravity?
Now I have to admit that my last actual school lessons (e.g. physics & biology ) were many many many years ago, but how the heck is that supposed to work?
I mean there's some serious G-forces involved here and - honestly - I'd prefer my brain on the inside of my skull instead of having it squelching out my ears

What's offsetting all these G's from accelaration & de-accelation then?

[Boris the Cat]

Perhaps the pilot is suspended in a tank of water/goo?

[Betelgeuse]

or George already tried it at realistic acceleration and found the game to be boring so this is one of those gameplay > realism things.

[Petrus]

Does the pilot necessarily have a human body in the first place, or could it be human consciousness in a machine format? Or possibly a ship remotely operated by an ansible-like technology by a normal human sitting at a computer desk EXACTLY LIKE THE ONE YOU'RE AT RIGHT NOW.

[Fossaman]

Since there's one reference to your character being SHOT in person, with a handgun, I'm gonna say 'no' to that one, Petrus.

Anyways, thanks OddBob. What velocity in the xml equals the speed of light, by the way?

[Blinzler]

@Boris the Cat
I dunno, we're talking something like 100k G's... I seriously doubt you can offset that with some suspension liquid.

@Betelgeuse
And by no mean's I would want to change the acceleration to "a survivable" value. I don't have that kind of time

I'm just curious for the possible explanations out there.

@Petrus
You mean the ship is more like a drone, or - extremely simply put - a remote-controlled robot?
That leaves the problem of the vastness of space and the slowness of communication. Basically it would require instantenous communication - without you couldn't fight at all - and I think that's not a given, either.

So far for my 5 cent's...

[Boris the Cat]

So far for my 5 cent's...

Damn that inflation!

[Petrus]

@Petrus
You mean the ship is more like a drone, or - extremely simply put - a remote-controlled robot?
That leaves the problem of the vastness of space and the slowness of communication. Basically it would require instantenous communication - without you couldn't fight at all - and I think that's not a given, either.

And here I was thinking that everyone had read Ender's Game. Check it out sometime, it's a good book! An ansible is a fictional method of instantaneous communication through quantum entanglement gobbledigook, through which someone could command space vessels across vast distances. If you read the book you'll get the joke that was in the rest of my post (seriously though it's a good book)!

And Fossaman... maybe the main character's robot body got shot! Although that does disprove the ansible theory. Curses. Maybe the main character uses some common future technology on his ship to become temporarily shifted out of phase with the normal universe into some kind of hyperdimension where 3 dimensional space appears compacted and trips between planets take a fraction of the time. Ships in this dimension would retain their relative size to the player's ship, but things like suns and planets would appear shrunken. Hyperdimensional targeting might be different and far more difficult than targeting in the conventional world, which would explain why we still have to manually aim most of our weapons even though they use extremely advanced technology.

As an aside, I still have 3 hours left of work today and I'm obviously bored to tears.

[Boris the Cat]

Maybe it's done like in the Endymion books. IE, the pilot gets a cruciform parasite attached, accelerates to 0.1 million G, gets squashed into a thin red paste, and then upon arrival, the pilot gets resurrected by the cruciform parasite.

[Blinzler]

Actually I've read Ender's Game and Xenoxid, too. (Punch me if the spelling is wrong, I've read them a long time ago and it was not the original? english)
Personally I wouldn't mind trying out this fun zero-G game they were playing.
If I get you joke right, though, there's some really unlucky guys out there somewhere. My last ship got blasted a few second's ago ('cos I didn't have any fuel left... gnaaaaa...).
Guess I'm no Ender. (Thank god, no monitor implanted in my neck, *yikes*)
But all this aside - I loved the book, too. But Xenoxid was somewhat of a disappointment.

Another 5 cents...

[Petrus]

Ahh, nice! Did you ever read Ender's Shadow? He starts a new set of books going from the same start point, but from Bean's perspective. The first and last one are great, the middle two decent but not amazing.

I've always hoped that someone would make a battle room mod for one of the many FPS (or flying type) games out there. That would be so cool, if a little disorienting.

[OddBob]

I think Betelgeuse is right, I seem to recall George said something once about having realistically sized systems, but it was boring to fly around (it's in the thread on the UTF where I discuss my system-size changing experiment, which I belive came from a discussion in Strategy split off from the Roadmap thread, but I can't be bothered to hunt it down atm)

I'd honestly prefer it just ignored than invent some ridiculous device for the sake of "realism" that's even less realistic.

What velocity in the xml equals the speed of light, by the way?

100.